help me help me help me thank you thank you thank you

Next to "I hate him. He's scum," that's my favorite Ann Lamott line ever (my stripped-down version of it, anyway). The "scum" line is from Operating Instructions, referring to her colicky infant whom we know perfectly well she loves desperately--I remember reading that and thinking, YES! Permission to feel what I feel.

She does it again in a wonderful essay at Salon (if you don't have a membership there, go ahead and watch the little ad for a day pass--worth it). That colicky infant is growing up and still kicking her butt. But Ms. Lamott? She kicks ass. Annie, thank you, thank you, thank you for helping me, helping me, helping me yet again.

WIPs? I got 'em.

It occurs to me that, for a knitting blog, I don't write about knitting, so much. This may be because lately I've done relatively little knitting. The items from the last post? The coffee cup? Last summer. The Dog? Maybe a year and a half ago.

And she's still not finished. To wit: the big ridickerous flap under her chin, which I need to just saw off and then sew her up.

But she does have a tutu.
Still, I've been stuck for a long time, because she needs more extensive plastic surgery. See how her arms and legs are splayed just a bit too far out? My plan is to cut wedges from her armpits and ... what is that place? Legpits? Anyway, I need to draw her extremities in toward the front a bit. Then perhaps a spot of nipping and tucking so as her bottom is more flat, so she can sit more comfortably.

But I'm so stuck. I had the BEST time making her -- knitted all in one piece in Lamb's Pride, then when I guessed I was about at her neck I added in the purple frufru stuff, then where the tutu would probably be, orange and fuchsia eyelash, and so on, and then sew her up except at the neck, and gather the edges of the ears, then the hot wash in the lingerie bag. She was actually cuter, more interesting, before I stuffed her -- her face had more structure, more personality. Lately, I've been working out in my head in more detail what I need to do, and then I'll give her another hot swim. That will be a delightful day, I know. For now, though, she lives here:
(Look carefully, and by her butt you'll see another WIP -- a scarf from the Scarf Style book, the Vintage Velvet cable thing in Muench Touch Me, which my Darlin' Husband gave me for my birthday in November and which will be delicious but is like knitting with wet spaghetti and makes me want to shoot myself. [But not so badly that I failed to kind of enjoy my first foray into cabling.] A worthy challenge, indeed.)

Basically, I have this problem -- I'm pretty swell at beginnings, but I suck at follow-through ... although it helps if it's on a deadline for some outside entity or person. My first sweater, for myself? 10 months. Now, mind you, it was endless miles of stockinette in COTTON -- this great, tunicky, long-sleeved THING in this marvelous tomato color. (More on this later.) My second and third sweaters, both for my sister? A couple months each. (1: Teva Durham's Weekend Unisex pullover thing in Noro Big Kureyon, the subtle blue-purple colorway, and 2: a very simple Oat Couture pullover pattern -- front and back are the same -- slip stitch ribbing? Pattern written for both chunky and worsted weight? -- in Linie Iceland, the fuchsia-cranberry colorway, and I was happy to find that those little plicky things do not shed. Both sweaters were delights to knit, and no, I don't have pictures, and they're in Pennsylvania. Maybe next year.) Christmas before last, a couple pairs of Bev Galeskas' felted clogs, one of them for my husband, and I managed to do it (and a variety of other knitted gifts) without him knowing.

But since last Christmas, I realize, I've been on a long, slow slide into that knitting fug. More WIPs:

This is my in-laws' Christmas present. LAST Christmas ... six months ago? The WIP is under the yarn tornado, which is the result of my chihuahua-poodle mix Bogart having spiderwebbed the downstairs one day in my absence. Eventually, this will be a pillow cover, intarsia in Lamb's Pride like the coffee cup, a rendition of an oil painting by my father-in-law, a landscape with fields and a barn in the foreground, the Blue Ridge and a threatening sky in the background. See the threatening sky in the bag? I'm actually almost halfway done -- through the fields and part of the barn (thank you Jay-zus -- I needed that crazy red after all those earth tones). I pooped out at Christmas, knowing I'd never make it, and hoped to get it done for Dad's Feb. birthday. Oh, well.

I did, however, finish one pillow cover -- this one for my brother-in-law.

I like this right much. It's roughly 13 x 13, and I had a blast working it -- and no, I don't know what the hell I did -- no pattern. Looks finished, right? The back is even sewn on and all that. But astute readers (craft nerds) will have picked up on the difficulty here. Which is that there seems to be no such thing as a 13 x 13 pillow form.







You see my problem.

There are 12-inch pillow forms, which don't work. This is a 14-inch pillow form. Now, my mother-in-law has given me a perfectly logical solution, which should take all of about 20 minutes: Rip open the pillow form, remove filling, cut an inch strip off two adjacent sides, refill and sew up. But that involves FINDING the sewing machine. So.

(Yep, that's the Bogart. I want it known that, while I generally dislike small dogs, I like Bogart. The Boge rocks.)

And then there are these.

On the left, with the CD perched on top, an example of severe Second Slipper Syndrome -- these will be for my aunt in Canada but were originally for her friend she is visiting in Germany -- I didn't get them done in time because it wasn't humanly possible, so she's giving the slippers I made for her to her friend, and she will take these. (I gotta get cracking -- she comes home in about a week.) To the right, behind the weird chocolate-smelling lotion that DH bought by accident, a random hat thing out of gorgeous Manos (knit round and round for a while, get bored, start ribbing, get bored, learn how to bobble and make a bunch of warty bobbles, get bored, do a raised zigzag thing, etc., until I have a long Dr. Seuss hat for next winter).

And, last but not remotely least but ... well, I guess it depends on your perspective:

Hard to see, and this may be very sad, but this is my duffle from my Easter weekend visit to my mother in Georgia, and it remained thus until a couple days ago, but with more and more laundry piled on top of it. If you look carefully, toward the upper left you see a ball of glowing, chocolate brown Rowan Calmer, the yummiest cotton anything I've ever touched -- one of several, bought by my sister to be knitted by me for my mother into a vast, sleeveless tank thing. Mama is not small, and she needs to be comfortable and she's a little partickler ... yeah. I'm swatching, and I've picked a couple stitch patterns from Barbara Walker. But you know? I'm having a hard time.

A baby step this last weekend, though -- on Saturday, I taught myself how to yarn over. I don't know why, but I have been crazy-daunted by that.

And I find myself wondering what a wiggly rib would look like felted in Lamb's Pride.

So there.

FO

In this case, "FO" means Found Object. I can't say "Finished Object," because I don't really know what this is. A potholder? A trivet? A mini wall hanging? (I took it to an office I worked in for a stretch, but I had to hang it by one corner, tilted, for it to make sense. It still didn't.) But I found it. Actually, my husband did, under a towering pile of books and magazines and papers and god knows what else on an end table in our living room. (We really LIVE in our living room.) Ann? This is it, that mysterious project from a couple of posts ago with a buncha bobbins hanging off it, my first foray into intarsia. This is from last summer, when I had this intense hunger for color and a new skill and a puzzle, so I sort of laid out the basic shape on an excel sheet and then pillaged my stash for every Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride color I could find ... and then went to Lettuce Knit (Richmond) and supplemented.

Have I waxed about Lamb's Pride? Nothing felts like it, nothing is so gorgeous. My dream sweater may be an Aran mess (new skills!) out of That Red. I don't know what it's called, but it's the red around the border in this thing.

And finally, a WIPFTL (WIP for too long): Here She is.



More on Hippo Doggie later.

I went to the zoo today and was present within 15 minutes after the birth of a pair of Armenian mouflon twins. Wish them well, and happy googling. Speaking of twins, visit Melanoma Uberalis, linked at right, and then make goo-goo eyes at the fathers (and friends) of your children.

Sanity is ...

... not trying to create a post while the two youngest are semi-arguing. (Full disclosure: a few minutes later here, past both of their bed times, they're quiet. I'm of the mind that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.)

My third kid, previously known as 3 (I can't be sure, but I'm not willing to look it up, because life is too short) and now known as Malarkey, is too much like me. At least in some ways. I don't feel right unless I'm doing something creative; Malarkey, who started crying as soon as I woke him up this morning because it was 8 a.m., whereas I usually wake him up at 7:30 because ... long story, but circumstances allowed longer sleep today. Why was he crying? Because he wouldn't have enough time. (The bus comes at 9.) Time for what? Time for "everything."

Poor little guy, little hummingbird.

I am SO visiting with my homeopath friend on Wednesday.

Anyway -- so he informed me that he wanted to make a bear, and I said sure, fine. On Saturday, his old Waldorf school (he's now a public school kid because, you know, freelance writer + public school teacher + 4 kids DOES NOT = private school tuition) had its wonderful annual May Faire, with May pole dancing and flower wreaths and drumming circle and old friends and extraordinary food (damn old hippies and vegetarians and foodies, oh my), where he bought, with his own money, a sewn felt mole. He wants to make a bear like the mole. So I went online looking for patterns -- found myriad teddy bear patterns (don't you want to knit one, honey?), but he said, "no, I want ... nevermind." I asked him to tell me what he wanted to say, and he drew a pic that looked remarkably like his mole. So I basically traced his mole and extrapolated the rest, found some brown felt, got him sewing it with purple embroidery thread, because that's what we have ... and a little while ago he went to bed with a mostly sewn bear, and he's miraculously healed.

Don't you know, I should have been saying good night to my boys while I was writing this post. I'm going to go kiss sleeping babies now. (Babies ... my second child is 5'8". Oy.)

The Tooth Fairy Is a Bad Mother

And she's in a knitting ... fug.

As of a couple days ago, my third child had lost two teeth in two days. Yesterday, he notified me that he still had two teeth under his pillow. This morning, as I was waking him up, I realized he still had two teeth under his pillow. So what did I do? As he staggered up the stairs -- from his basement bedroom all the way up to our second floor because he can't tolerate the eau de new paint of the first-floor bathroom -- I stole two bucks out of his packpack and stuffed them under his pillow. His teeth are in my pocket as I write.

I broke a $20 at the tolls today, so I've got some one$.

How do you spell that noise Lurch used to make in The Addams Family?

As for "all will be revealed," Ann, it may be that I lied: The FO that was the result of that last photo, with all those crazy colors and hanging-windy-thingies (why can't I think of the name for them???), seems to have disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle that is my house.

Er, that would be the Tooth Fairy's House.